Lee Duck-hee has made the history for the sport of tennis after he won the main draw match of the Winston Salem Open earlier on Sunday to become the first ever deaf player to have reached that milestone.
The 21 years old South Korean player is deaf by birth. He was able to defeat this opponent the Swiss named Henri Laaksonen by 7-6 and 6-1 allowing him to move to the 2nd round for a match against no. 3 seeded Polish player Hubert Hurkacz.
Lee said to media through an interpreter, “People have been making fund on my disability my whole life. They told me that I should not have been playing. It was really difficult but I was helped by my family & friends to get through all that negativity. I wanted to show everyone that I can do this.
My message to the people who suffer from hearing impairment is to not get discouraged. If you try hard, you can do what you wish for.”
Lee made his first appearance of the sport at the ITF Future Tours back when he was 14 years old and before he was 18 years old, he had won 8 titles.
He also made it to the finals of 3 ATP Challenge Tour finals which include one earlier in June.
Talking about the achievement of the deaf player Lee, English tennis star Andy Murray said that he is amazed by how well Lee can play even with his impairment.
Murray said, “I am never going to be aware of how to play like this. But seeing him, he seems to be doing extremely great. So this is clearly an unbelievable achievement. In tennis hearing is really important, to read the spins and to see other things. If I was to play while wearing headphones, then it would be difficult for me to pick up on the speed of the ball coming at me. We use our ears to pick up on lots of thugs during tennis.”
Related Content
Cedric Benson, the star of Texas Longhorn and ex-RB for NFL, dies at age 36 in a motorcycle accident
